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Microscopes can see video on a laserdisc

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Re: Microscopes can see video on a laserdisc

#11

So CAV (constant angular velocity) is an encoding format for laser disks. When something is written with CAV, it is basically analogue data and therefore repeating patterns can be recognized on the disk.

No, CAV has nothing to do with encoding, and both analog and digital formats have used both CAV and CLV and hybrids of the two.

The legible text seen in the microscope images happens because of the combination of LaserDisc recording a raw and uncompressed encoding of the analog video signal, the way that LaserDisc used CAV to store an integer number of frames per track so that the image data for corresponding on-screen locations of subsequent frames would be aligned at the same radial position on the disc, and the credits scrolling vertically at constant speed.

If LaserDisc had used a digital encoding (especially a compressed encoding), the data on disc may still have had discernible patterns but the text would not necessarily have been legible. If it had used CAV but not stored a whole number of frames per track, then temporal and spatial locality on screen would not have corresponded so well to spatial locality on disc. And the vertically-scrolling credits are pretty much the only kind of content that can produce the recognizable and legible images on the disc surface.

I think the fact that the aspect ratio of the text came out approximately right probably is a consequence of the scrolling speed of the credits being chosen to suit the vertical resolution of the video. If the text had appeared squished in the microscope, it would probably have been moving too fast on screen to be clearly legible.

Re: Microscopes can see video on a laserdisc

#14
post #11

So CAV (constant angular velocity) is an encoding format for laser disks. When something is written with CAV, it is basically analogue data and therefore repeating patterns can be recognized on the disk.

No, CAV has nothing to do with encoding, and both analog and digital formats have used both CAV and CLV and hybrids of the two. The legible text seen in the microscope images happens because of the combination of LaserDisc recording a raw and uncompressed encoding of the analog video signal, the way that LaserDisc used CAV to store an integer number of frames per track so that the image data for corresponding on-scre…

Is the image seen via microscope basically a readout of the image on a spectroscope?

Those can have near-legible images, but most of the time they are not.

Re: Microscopes can see video on a laserdisc

#16

So CAV (constant angular velocity) is an encoding format for laser disks. When something is written with CAV, it is basically analogue data and therefore repeating patterns can be recognized on the disk.

Sorta?

The data being written to the disk is the same in CAV or CLV disks, but the player just needs to know how to spin the disk at the right speed so that the laser can read the pits/lands correctly. It is purely a detail about the speed that the disk is spun at so they can cram more data on it with CLV disks.

What CAV LaserDiscs allow for, though, is to make it extremely obvious where scanlines and blanking intervals are in the video signal.

Re: Microscopes can see video on a laserdisc

#17
Fun fact about laser discs. They are analogue not digital. CD’s store digital information with the presence or absence of pits. Fairly ancient but still fundamentally feels like a very old version of a thumb drive.

Laser discs are not digital. They encode the analogue video signal’s value as the length of the pit. It is digitized in the time domain - sampled at some frequency, but the “vertical” signal value is stored entirely analogue. In terms of encoding it’s more similar to a VHS tape than a CD. Kinda crazy.

Re: Microscopes can see video on a laserdisc

#18
post #15

Not nearly as cool, but I was able to show a colleague the letters in a raster image section of a pdf using xxd by varying the output width

I wrote a simple tool, when I was a kid, that dumped binaries into VGA mode 0x13 and allowed me to vary the width. Mode 0x13 is one byte per pixel so it was just a simple REP MOVSB to put data into the buffer (no worrying about bitplanes). It was so useful in reverse engineering software. Besides raster data, regular data structures often jump out.

Re: Microscopes can see video on a laserdisc

#19
post #17

Fun fact about laser discs. They are analogue not digital. CD’s store digital information with the presence or absence of pits. Fairly ancient but still fundamentally feels like a very old version of a thumb drive. Laser discs are not digital. They encode the analogue video signal’s value as the length of the pit. It is digitized in the time domain - sampled at some frequency, but the “vertical” signal value is store…

yeah i remember learning this as a kid and being surprised. i originally thought laserdiscs were modern high tech, but then they turned out to actually be from the late 70s/early 80s with the primitive analog video encoding where red book audio cds of the mid to late 80s were actually digital.
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